The House That Jack Built

ELEVEN

'It was one of those stupid moments when I thought I might like to put down roots.' Jack's hands were moving at great speed, grabbing what to Gwen seemed a random selection of wires and components from the metal shelving. 'They don't happen often, and when they do I stamp on them quick. They cause nothing but trouble.'

'And mortgage payments,' Gwen chipped in, opening the large canvas bag wider so that Jack could drop everything in.

'It seemed a good idea at the time. It was a nice place, and I could afford it.'

'Bit big for a man on his own, perhaps?'

'I like my space,' he replied with a grin. 'Besides, I often had company.'

Jack grabbed what looked like a tape deck and dropped it into the bag, making Gwen grunt with the weight.

'I just bet you did.' She put the bag down and zipped it shut. 'What's all this stuff for anyway? Shouldn't we be on our way?'

'I'm going as fast as I can!' Jack grabbed another bag. 'But we may need some of this stuff if we're going ghost-hunting.'

'Who ya gonna call?' Gwen muttered, deadpan.

'Torchwood!' Jack yelled, shouldering the second bag. 'To the Mystery Machine!'

'Don't try and quote popular culture,' Gwen sighed. 'You always get it wrong.'

'Never,' Jack laughed, heading out of the Hub. 'I am the man with his finger on the pulse.'

'This from the man who thought Little Britain starred Tommy Handley…' Gwen replied, following after him.

Down in the Autopsy Room, Alexander sighed and lifted his head from his examination of Danny Wilkinson's body.

'Excuse me, children!' he shouted. 'May I remind you that some of us are trying to work down here?'

He waited for a response, but the only one he got was the heavy Hub door rolling closed behind Jack and Gwen. The penny dropped. 'Oi!' he shouted. 'I'm still down here!' He dropped his scalpel next to Danny's sliced kidneys and pounded his fist on the examination table. 'Bloody typical …'

***

Gwen often moaned that Jack drove like he did everything in life: aggressively, theatrically and at enough speed that he hoped people wouldn't notice the rough edges. He had never had an accident, but Gwen wasn't sure why not; he seemed to be working very hard at it after all. Ianto had told her about the number of speeding tickets the police sent to the dummy license address — it was a morning's work every few weeks hacking into the system and making them all vanish again.

'I thought there was no such thing as ghosts,' she said, trying to take her mind off the journey.

'There's not…' Jack replied, using the gears to slow him down enough to take a roundabout without sending the SUV into a roll. 'Not in the traditional sense anyway. That doesn't mean there aren't phenomena that have given rise to the belief in ghosts over the years.'

'Residual haunting, right? The stuff that Bernie Harris's ghost machine picked up on.'

'Not quite. That machine was a quantum transducer that allowed you to see images outside your own temporal fixed point. That's actually more of a Time TV than a ghost machine.'

'Time TV?' Gwen raised an eyebrow.

Jack smiled. 'Residual haunting is the idea that emotional events of sufficient potency give off a wave of energy that is stored in solid matter — an old house, a murder weapon, a site of historical violence — and are then picked up later like psychic radio and re-experienced by someone sufficiently attuned to those frequencies. It was put forward as a theory in the early 1960s. It's been a popular explanation for ghosts ever since.'

'Popular? Not correct?'

'Not quite. Matter and energy just don't work that way. Taking for granted that emotional outbursts can be stored in physical matter — which they can, but in a such a weak and fragile form that most dissipate quickly — the human skull exists as an insulator against stray electromagnetic fields bombarding the brain. We'd be freaking out every time someone turned on a mobile phone otherwise.' He shut up for a second, concentrating on avoiding a group of teenagers crossing the road. One of them stuck their middle finger up at him as the drag from the vehicle sent him off balance and into the gutter.

'You missed,' Gwen said.

'Better luck next time.'

'So… skull as an insulator…?'

'Yeah, basically we pick up on the vaguest of emotions: déjà vu, maybe a sense that you're not alone in a room… nothing concrete, nothing visual. For that you'd need one hell of an amplifier. Cardiff's sat on one with the Rift, of course, but even then it would take an incredibly focused burst of energy to visualise something without some pretty nifty equipment.'

'But it's possible?'

'Oh yeah … and not just in Cardiff. Most hot spots for ghost sightings have some kind of external influence at work — Borley Rectory, the Treasurer's House in York… both the sights of some pretty major temporal fallout. It's not always natural, though. I remember this old museum in Stratford-upon-Avon, built its whole reputation on the amount of supernatural sightings within its walls… The owner was bombarding the place with hallucinogenic theta waves, hoping to summon up Shakespeare. People were tripping their rocks off the minute they crossed the threshold.'

'What did you do?'

'Locked him in his own gift shop for four days. Poor guy was convinced he was Oliver Cromwell by the time I let him out. He's probably back to eating solids by now… Anyway …' He turned into Penylan Road. 'The point is: it takes a lot of factors to come together in order to provide an actual physical manifestation, and even then it's worth checking it's not something altogether different…'

They were distracted by the flashing lights of a police car and an ambulance. The woman that Ianto had seen killed earlier was being zipped into a body bag and carried away from the scene.

Jack wound down his window and called to one of the police officers. 'What happened?'

The policeman looked him up and down. 'You lot, is it?' He checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was listening. 'Looks like hit and run, woman was knocked over coming out of the shop over there, dragged halfway up the road, right state she is. No bugger saw anything, of course, but it doesn't take Quincy to piece it together. Unless you know different?'

Jack smiled. 'Of course not.' He shoved the SUV back into first gear. 'Just passing by. See you around.'

'Bloody hope not.'

Jack wound the window back up. 'Let's hope that's a coincidence, shall we?'

'Violent death? Coincidence? Us?' Gwen didn't believe it for a moment.

'Ianto's the priority. Everything else can wait.'

Around the corner, Jack swung the SUV off the road and into Jackson Leaves' small forecourt. He was out of the vehicle before Gwen had so much as unclipped her seatbelt. She joined him at the door as he rapped insistently on the wood.

'Can you smell onions?' she asked as they waited for someone to answer. When nobody had after a few seconds, Jack opened the door and stormed inside.

'You don't still own the place, you know,' Gwen said, following awkwardly.

'Now's not the time for formalities,' Jack replied, looking around the hall. 'Hasn't changed much… Hello?' he shouted. 'Mr Wallace? Ianto?'

There was a sound of movement from behind one of the doors and he ran forward, storming into the lounge and narrowly avoiding the poker Rob swung at him as he crossed the threshold.

'Rob Wallace, I presume?' Jack said, pulling the poker from the panicked man's hand and holding up his own in a gesture of surrender. 'The door was open…'